Tent Camp in Gaza Engulfed by Flames After Israeli Strike

At least four Palestinians taking shelter by a hospital were killed in a strike Israeli officials said was targeting a Hamas command center.

Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip killed Palestinians in a tent encampment on the grounds of a hospital and in a school turned shelter, according to residents and U.N. officials, as deadly fighting also raged between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Survivors of the strike at the hospital complex in central Gaza described flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony and people fleeing past bodies charred and unrecognizable in the night. At least four people were killed and scores of others, including children, were severely burned, according to a U.N. official, Joyce Msuya.

Many had fled to the hospital in search of refuge from earlier Israeli airstrikes.

“It is like living in a recurring nightmare,” said Mahmoud Wadi, a 20-year-old whose extended family had been living on the hospital grounds for months. “Every time we sleep, we wake up to this same scenario of tents struck, people screaming.”

An Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said that the Israeli Air Force had targeted a Hamas command center in a parking lot adjacent to the hospital and that the fire was “most likely due to secondary explosions.”

The strikes in Gaza came as Israel vowed to retaliate for a Hezbollah drone strike on Sunday that killed four soldiers and wounded dozens of others at a military base in northern Israel. “We will continue to hit Hezbollah mercilessly in all parts of Lebanon — even in Beirut,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video statement from the military base where the soldiers were killed.

On Monday, the Israeli military struck the village of Aitou in northern Lebanon, killing at least 21 people, according to Lebanese health officials. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Aitou is in a largely Christian region not known to have been targeted before by Israel as it steps up its assault on Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that began firing into Israel a year ago after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.

The pace and intensity of Hezbollah’s attacks appear to have increased as well in recent days. The group has pledged to extend its range of fire and force more Israelis to flee their homes. On Monday, Hezbollah fired at least 115 more projectiles into Israeli territory, according to the military.

A day earlier, Hezbollah announced a total of 38 attacks — each of which could involve multiple projectiles — the most since it began its cross-border strikes on Israel over a year ago. Over the first two weeks of October, there have been more alerts warning Israelis of rocket fire from Lebanon than in any month over the last year, according to Rocket Alert, an online tracker that uses figures from the Israeli military’s Home Front Command.

The figures indicated that, for all the ferocity of Israel’s onslaught in Lebanon, Hezbollah still has enough weaponry and fighters to threaten Israel with deadly violence and displace its citizens, about 60,000 of whom have evacuated northern Israel. Israeli strikes in Lebanon have displaced an estimated one million people, according to the United Nations.

The Israeli strike that hit the tent encampment near Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the city of Deir al Balah did not damage the hospital itself, according to the Israeli military. But it left charred tents, blackened appliances and smoldering piles of clothes on the hospital grounds, video footage taken by The Associated Press and Reuters showed.

Survivors interviewed at the camp told The New York Times that after the strike, they almost instantly felt the heat of a fast-moving fire, fueled by explosions from canisters of cooking gas and flames that fed on plastic tents. They said it was the seventh time the hospital grounds had been hit.

Despite the danger, Abed Musleh, a 25-year-old who was sheltering in a tent in the parking lot with his wife, two children, and his four sisters, said he had no plans to leave. He said he could not imagine that any place would be safer than a hospital.

Mohammed Ramadan, whose family of 10 survived but lost their tent, said he also felt trapped. “There are no safe places, and no places left to shelter in,” he said.

Louise Wateridge, the Gaza spokeswoman for UNRWA, the main U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, said she heard about the strike at 3 a.m. from a colleague who had been sheltering in the hospital’s courtyard with other families.

“There were no warnings,” Ms. Wateridge said. “Everyone was sleeping.”

The Israeli military has repeatedly struck hospitals in Gaza, saying they have been used by Hamas.

Hours earlier, in the nearby city of Nuseirat, the Israeli military struck another site where Palestinians had sought refuge, a school turned shelter, according to UNRWA. Palestinian civil defense, an emergency service in Gaza, said that at least eight bodies had been recovered from the scene.

The Israeli military did not claim responsibility for the strike, but said the incident was under review. In recent months, Israeli forces have conducted dozens of airstrikes on schools that have been converted into shelters, often saying that the buildings were being used by Hamas.

Severe damage to the school in Nuseirat forced officials to scrap plans to use it for the second stage of a campaign to vaccinate children against polio, according to the head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, who did not name the school or provide details of the attack.

UNRWA said in a statement that it aimed to reach 590,000 children under the age of 10 in less than two weeks, providing vitamin A in addition to the polio vaccine.

The campaign will be run in coordination with Israel’s military, according to COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories and coordinates with international relief organizations.

Ms. Wateridge said that while vaccination was critical for the health of children living in Gaza, they will “inevitably return straight back into the dangerous and inhumane conditions they came from.”

In a separate incident, UNRWA reported that Israeli shells had hit a U.N. food distribution center in the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya. An UNRWA spokeswoman, Juliette Touma, said that 10 people had been reported killed and 40 others wounded. Reuters reported the same death toll, citing Palestinian medics.

Israel’s military said the details of the incident were under review. In a statement, it said that it “directs its strikes and operations only against terror targets and operatives and does not target civilians.”

Reporting was contributed by Erika Solomon, Aryn Baker, Ephrat Livni, Raja Abdulrahim Abu Bakr Bashir, Johnatan Reiss and Gabby Sobelman.

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